MythTV

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MythTV project site

What is MythTV

Arjen's MythTV box

Now, before you start chanting "geek"... the setup below replaces a 6 year old configuration of a Duron 800 minitower with 19" CRT. It has served as our main television for a few years now, and my wife loves it as much as I do. Our two-year old daughter is already attempting to hack into the system to watch more Wiggles and Pocoyo. MythTV rocks. But, that setup was nearing the end of its live. I've already had to replace the HDs earlier. So the below is the new configuration. It sounds more fancy than it is (hey it's only a P4) although it is pretty slick (it's in the living room, after all) and this stuff is quite affordable nowadays... who would think you could buy a decent 22" LCD screen for way under $500 ? 22" is 56cm - it's widescreen with less bulk around the edges so it looks smaller as a unit, but it's really pretty big. With a DVB-T (digital TV) tuner and DVDs it looks really good.

  • Shuttle XPC SS30G2 SE with P4 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM
  • ASUS EN7300 LE PCI Express video card - basically a cheap NVIDIA 7300 LE. Auto-detected by Edgy, fine with "nv" drivers, is fast enough for DVD playing, and automatically supports 1860x1050 widescreen LCD. Reason I got this card is that it has DVI, (2x) VGA, and TV out. I'm using the DVI now. I don't care about 3D accel. or whatever so I don't even need the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers.
    • Fixing video res - if you want to use the on-board SiS 662 Mirage 1 (I had hassles with the SiS driver, so got stuck with VESA which can't do DVD at speed, or support 1680x1050). Getting the NVIDIA card was a cheapish workaround that also got me the DVI (and TV) out.
  • 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA - you can do internal sw RAID (like mirror) but two HDs will heat up the box further. Better solution might be USB or NAS (scales better too).
  • ViewSonic VX2235wm 22" HD widescreen LCD
  • Tuners
    • Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP - PCI analog + remote (Deluxe version = 878 tuner, not Expert version which has a different tuner).
    • Twinhan DTV Alpha - USB HDTV digital 7045A + remote (tuner chip can differ, you may have to be lucky to find the Linux supported one... I somehow got lucky).
    • DViCO Fusion HDTV - USB HDTV digital + remote - supported with drivers from Chris Pascoe
  • Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)
    • Installing Edgy on this Shuttle hardware - Replacement drivers for SATA controller and Ethernet Adapter. Ubuntu 7.04 has this stuff by default, but I tried the beta which had some quirky behaviour so I decided to go with this slightly older but proven release.
    • DVD decoders - Needed for DVD playing
  • TV guide data source readers (XMLTV)

Other Resources

Retrieved from "http://lentz.com.au/MythTV"
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